In my
last post, I looked at the impact of short term missions on the
participants, and the common response that goes something like:
“The people I met were so happy yet they had so little. It made me
realize I should really be more grateful for what I have.”
While I think that being more grateful in general is a worthwhile goal to
pursue, this response of gratitude after spending time in a materially poor
community is incomplete.
Gratitude is incomplete because it
only requires us to change the way we
think about our present situation, without challenging us to examine if there
is anything that needs to be changed about our present situation.
Witnessing poverty should cause us to struggle with difficult questions:
Why is this community poor?
How do my
own community and my lifestyle contribute to this situation?
The causes of poverty are extremely complex, and I certainly don’t
have the answers to these questions. These are questions that I have been
struggling to make sense of for over a decade.
It’s not enough to talk about giving men fish, or teaching them to
fish. We have to ask who owns the lake? Who is allowed to fish
there? Who benefits most from the fish that are caught? Is the
environment of the lake being taken care of to allow the fish to thrive, or is
it being polluted so that life and therefore business cannot be sustained?
While there may be some people who are poor because of laziness or their own
character flaws, the majority of people living in poverty are stuck in
oppressive systems and unjust regulations that make it very difficult to get
ahead.
There are complex global factors that perpetuate poverty.
The cliché of a global village is the reality
that we live in today, and I want to share two examples of how our lifestyles
in the West affect global poverty.
As a result of trying to keep up with ever changing fashion, many of us continually buy new clothes and replace old
ones – not because they are worn out, but because they are out of style.
In order to produce clothes so cheaply, the majority of our ready to wear
clothes are made in sweatshop factories in other countries, where workers are
exposed to low wages, unsafe working conditions, and long hours. Because
competition for textile factories has become so fierce, contractors have to
compromise on safety standards and illegally low wages for their workers in
order to win contracts. Our demand for cheap and fashionable clothing
drives this competition and results in sweatshops that oppress workers and
perpetuate poverty.
Many of us feel better when at least we donate our old clothing to thrift
stores and charities. But what happens to all of these discarded
clothes? Tons and tons of our discarded clothing is sent to countries
around the world, where they are sold cheaply in second hand markets.
Although this does create employment for some people in terms of those who sell
clothes in the market, the influx of cheap clothing inhibits the development of
local textile industries which would benefit local communities a lot more than
secondhand markets. Locally made clothing simply cannot compete with
cheap used clothing. Kenya, for example, used to have a thriving local
textile industry until cheap imported secondhand clothing arrived.
Another example of how those of us from the West impact global poverty is
the issue of environmental degradation and global climate change.
If you have any doubts that global climates
are changing, just talk to some rural Ugandan farmers.
Rainfall seasons used to be very predictable
– although there would always be some difficult seasons where there was not as
much rain, the actual time that the rains began and ended were very
predictable, which allowed farmers to know exactly when to plant. In the
past decade, the climate has changed and the rains have become much more
unpredictable. As a result, small scale farmers are the ones who are hit
the hardest with the unpredictability of the rains, as planting at the wrong time
can lead to a smaller harvest or even a complete crop failure. For a
family dependent on agriculture, like over 70% of Ugandans, a bad growing
season can result in debilitating poverty.
Even though it is the lifestyle of those of us from the West that is disproportionately contributing to
global climate change, it is the poorest communities in the world who are most
affected by the effects of climate change.
For those of us from affluent communities, it’s easy for us to point fingers
at poor communities and say “its them – they are lazy, and their government is
corrupt, and they are stuck in a poverty mentality.” It’s a lot harder
for us to point those fingers back at ourselves and realize “it’s also
us.Our demand for cheap and excessive consumer goods is contributing to
unjust labor practices around the world, and our lifestyle contributes to
environmental degradation which disproportionately affects the global poor, and
our country is one of many that enforce unjust trade regulations, and was
involved in a history of injustice and oppression that still has economic
repercussions.”
This is a complex issue and there are no easy answers, and it’s extremely
challenging to live outside of the “systems” that make up our communities,
regardless of how oppressive we realize they are.
While I have changed some aspects of my
lifestyle in response to the intricacies of poverty I have wrestled with, there
are just as many aspects of my lifestyle that I struggle to change.
My point in writing this is to draw attention to these issues, and to
suggest that spending time in a materially poor community should cause us to
examine these hard questions and realize our own contribution to the problem,
rather than just to be grateful that we have an abundance while others do
not. The solution to poverty doesn’t lie in those of us from affluent
communities focusing on how we can change poor communities, it also involves us
being willing to honestly and critically examine our own contribution to the
problem and commit to change our own communities.
